The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set

by D J Edwardson

  “What do you mean ‘sealed itself’?” Cade asked.

  “Completely shut? You mean you and your team didn’t fix it?” Trey echoed Cade’s confusion.

  Images of the sealed hole flowed from Raif’s mind into theirs, juxtaposed with an image of the breach in its initial state.

  “Clear enough?” Raif continued. “It closed right up like it was a piece of skin and—according to some schematics I dug up in the ship’s logs—that’s because the hull is, in some strange way I don’t understand, alive. It’s made of some hybrid form of celerium called velar and it has properties similar to a living organism.”

  Varying degrees of disbelief ran through the minds of those present, everyone except Adan. He remembered the way Zain had described celerium to him as somehow alive. Zain might have been the most noble person he had met in his short time in the Vast. Though a member of the savage Waymen who roamed the desert, raiding and looting the cast away machines and parts which littered the dunes, he had never acted like one. He had saved Adan’s life more than once and his death in Manx Core had been perhaps Adan’s most bitter loss yet. When Zain had told him about the living properties of the rare black rock, Adan had dismissed it as just another Wayman superstition, but after what Raif had shared, Adan wondered whether Zain had really been all that far off the mark.

  “That makes no sense. Rocks are inanimate. They're just raw materials,” Cade stated, his mind groping to understand the concept. “The logs have to be mistaken.”

  “You are free to look it up for yourself, but that is my story and I’m sticking to it,” Raif declared.

  A puzzled silence ensued, broken at last by Von’s thoughts. “If that is what you found, Raif, then I have no reason to doubt you. But what about you, Gavin? Did the tunneler actually damage it? Or is it completely invulnerable like we first thought?”

  “Sierra’s memories were accurate,” Gavin reported. “It does seem as if cross stream locus energy can harm it. Given what Raif has just told us, that would stand to reason, because that sort of energy can harm both organic and inorganic material. Apparently that’s what this velar is, both alive and inanimate at the same time.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got a living—and non-living—ship, whatever that means,” Trey put in. “But I don’t see how this gives us much of an advantage over the Collective, especially since we don’t even know where they are.”

  “But we do,” Gavin announced. “The Collective fleet is currently hunkered down in Breaker’s Hollow, a canyon about thirty clicks from here.”

  “Are you sure?” Trey followed up. “Then the trace worked?”

  “I used my memories from my time with Malthus as the seed and worked forward from there. I was able to track the survivors by switching the focus, mid-trace, to another Developer named Cyrith,” Gavin confirmed. Nervous excitement, infused with fear about what this all meant, spread across the channel.

  “Wait, so since Malthus is dead, is Cyrith in charge of the Collective now?” Jax asked. Adan noted with some discomfort the deep level of respect Jax seemed to have for the man of whom he spoke. Whether it was based out of fear or loyalty, though, Adan couldn’t tell.

  “Yes,” Gavin stated.

  “I only ever had contact with about a half dozen of the Admins,” Jax remarked. “But I remember Cyrith. He was a little different. I can’t quite put my finger on it, though.”

  “So who is he? Gavin, you knew him, right?” Raif tossed his questions into the mix. As a former Developer, Gavin was the only one that might know anything about what Cyrith was really like. “What was his role among the Developers? Did he have a military background? Is he mad for power? And, most importantly, what color is his hair?”

  Even Gavin cracked a smile at that last remark.

  “Cyrith has brown hair, but that shouldn’t surprise you. All the members of the Collective do. We’re all based on the same generational map. As for your other questions, he doesn’t have any military expertise, though he did help Malthus create the somatarchs. He liked to keep in the background, mostly, and stick to his research, but he had a very important role in Oasis.” Gavin gave Adan a telling look. “He was the head of the Institute.”

  An image of the scientist in question flashed through their minds. He looked in most ways just like all the others, but not to Adan.

  Five

  The Persepolis

  “You are making steady progress, and I have some good news for you,” the scientist’s words played back through Adan’s memory.

  Of all the visits Adan had received in the Institute, the one that stood out the most was the first time he had been told about the esolace. He had not known it then, but he realized now that this was when he had met Cyrith.

  There was a look in Cyrith’s eyes that had made him stand out. The other scientists were distant, as if they were half asleep or perpetually disinterested, but not Cyrith. Intelligence glinted inside his eyes, not cruel and calculating as with Darius, but in its own way just as focused and intense. Cyrith wanted answers. He appeared to be studying things, measuring them all the time. Though many things from Adan’s time in the Institute remained hazy in his memory, this was not one of them.

  “So he survived the storm and the quakes,” Adan commented. “What are his plans?”

  “Yes, I’d like to know that as well,” Von put in. “Oasis is gone. So is Manx Core. Where else do they have to run?”

  “Cyrith is not running,” Gavin declared, eyeing the chronotrace in the middle of the table. “He has a fleet of dozens of ships and he plans on using them. Just as soon as the storm dies down enough for an attack.”

  He’s trying to ease into this, Adan observed from Gavin’s subsurface thoughts. Those didn’t come through the bioseine unless a person wanted them to, but Adan’s memorant abilities allowed him to see things the others couldn’t.

  “Who do they plan on attacking? Us?” Jax asked, alarmed. “Do they know our present location?”

  “No, Cyrith has no idea we survived. Nor would he give it much thought if he did,” Gavin was quick to assure them.

  “But who else is there to attack?” Von wondered.

  Adan’s mind went instantly to the Welkin. Gavin had told him that Malthus had threatened to attack them if he didn’t help him with the chronotrace. Maybe Malthus was lying. Maybe they had intended to attack the Welkin all along.

  “He’s going after the Wayman city of Hull.” Gavin declared.

  Confusion and bewilderment cascaded through the minds of those gathered at the table, including Adan’s. Why would the Collective want to attack Hull? Yes, they had some technology, but it was primitive compared to what the Collective possessed and when Adan had been there the city was still under construction. It would hardly be a suitable base of operations for Cyrith and his fleet.

  “But why—?” Adan began, before suddenly remembering something—“Senya.” The name of his friend burst into the channel like a blast of sand in the face. All thoughts of Cyrith’s purpose flew from his mind. “Senya’s there. We can’t let Cyrith attack that city.”

  “I agree, but first we have to—” Gavin began, but Adan’s thoughts kept tumbling out.

  “The Collective has no use for Werin. They’ll kill her along with everyone else, Waymen and Welkin alike. We have to stop them.”

  “And risk the lives of everyone on this ship? I don’t think so,” Jax countered.

  “Hold on, let’s put a damper on things until we are all on the same page.” Raif interjected. “Who’s Senya? And what is this Hull place? I’m getting mixed vibes with all these thoughts flying around. Let’s keep everybody in sync here.”

  Gavin used his memorant abilities to project a calming presence across the channel, helping the others rein in their emotions. “Hull is a Wayman city built using a great deal of salvaged equipment from the Vast. The Waymen there have managed to build a considerable amount of new machinery as well, but it is mostly very primitive.”

  “Wait,�
� Von responded, “the Waymen are highly superstitious about technology, aren’t they? I thought they generally avoided it.”

  “You are correct,” Gavin replied. “But their leader is a former Developer, a memorant named Nolan. And it looks like he has convinced some of the Waymen to embrace it.”

  Nolan loomed like a shadow at the back of Adan’s thoughts. If anyone could stand up to the Collective it was him, but if Hull did resist the attack, Adan doubted Nolan would stop there. As large as his city was and as many Waymen as he had under his control, the Vast would simply be swapping one tyrant for another.

  “But that doesn’t explain why the Collective would want to attack them,” Jax observed. “If Cyrith was an Admin, he won’t just be doing this out of spite, especially if he doesn’t have a military background. He must have something else in mind, another round of experiments, maybe?”

  Gavin sat back in his chair and folded his hands. He’s worried how we’ll react once we know the truth, Adan realized.

  Gavin inhaled deeply and drew himself up in his chair. “Cyrith does have a reason for wanting to attack Hull. And I think the best way for you to understand it is to show you.”

  Gazing at the chronotrace, Gavin’s eyes glossed over and the ring around the device began to glow with a yellow light. The device spun into motion. A moment later, a new scene flashed into existence all around them. They found themselves in a room nearly identical to the one they were in, but occupied by only two people. They were looking through the chronotrace into the Command Center of the other praxis cruiser in the Collective fleet, the one called the Persepolis.

  Cyrith stood with his back towards the massive viewing window in the control room of the praxis. There was not much to see there anyway. Breaker’s Hollow was a bland, weather beaten bowl of rock devoid of any activity other than the storm that had been raging all day. It covered everything in sheets of sand, blowing back and forth across the canyon walls, scouring them clean.

  The thin framed man wore his customary silver lab coat, the mercurial sheen of the fabric shifting subtly in the light. He looked every bit the Institute scientist that he was, but he was no longer at the Institute. He was out of his element and he knew it. Still, he did not trust anyone else to act in his place, including Xander, the other man standing in the room with him. Along with Cyrith they were all that remained of the Developers.

  Xander leaned against the railing of the exit ramp. He had traded in his silver lab coat for something more practical. He wore a brown, one-piece jumper. Otherwise, his appearance mirrored that of Cyrith.

  The Persepolis rested at the back of a large canyon, along with the remains of the fleet from Manx Core. Though they had managed to salvage close to forty percent of the ships from the freak quakes which had destroyed their former base, given what they were up against Cyrith doubted that would be enough.

  Besides the losses to the fleet, they had lost the commander of their military forces in the disaster as well. Cyrith had waited over a day for Malthus to arrive, but it was now clear that neither he nor the Maven would be making it to the rendezvous point in the canyon.

  Could the Maven have fallen into the hands of the deviants? Could Malthus have gone rogue? There were too many unknowns and that is what worried him. He liked to know all of the variables before going into an experiment. That way the results were more of a formality, a confirmation of what he already knew. But with war, certainty was never guaranteed.

  He was confident that Nolan would not be a problem and felt they could probably handle the deviant threat as well, but the Delegation was another matter. Cyrith had no idea what capabilities they had managed to develop after all these years. The one thing he did know was that they were coming, and he doubted they would be satisfied with simply reclaiming what Darius had stolen from them. Cyrith suspected they would not rest until every last member of the Collective had been annihilated, starting with him.

  “How convenient for Darius to have died,” Cyrith mused. “Now we are forced to clean up his mess.”

  “From everything in the logs we managed to salvage, it sounds like he didn’t have a whole lot of choice. The Delegation was killing the planet anyway. Darius just finished what they started.”

  Cyrith sighed ever so softly. Of course Xander would say that. As a memorant his thoughts had been more closely scrutinized by Darius than other members of the Collective. Even now, he failed to see that the scalpel which hovered an inch from their necks had been placed there by his former mentor. Cyrith did not yet have a clear idea how Darius had managed to manipulate everyone’s thoughts so thoroughly over such a long period of time, but it was clear that his abilities as a memorant far surpassed anything they had previously imagined.

  “And yet he clearly did not finish the Delegation off or they could not have sent those scouts,” Cyrith replied, checking any judgmental thoughts from creeping into their shared channel. He needed Xander’s support more than anything right now and since Xander still held a vestige of respect for the Developer who had created the Collective it would not be wise to disparage Darius too much.

  “We still don’t have hard evidence that the Delegation sent anything more than those scout ships. And if that’s all they have, the remains of the Manx Core fleet will be more than enough to handle them,” Xander commented.

  Cyrith once again held his emotions in check. Xander was apparently even less skilled in military matters than himself.

  “Malthus did not seem to think so,” Cyrith reminded him. “He said the sidereal portals the ships were carrying could mean only one thing: preparation for a zero dimension invasion.”

  “But then why send the scouts?” Xander asked. “Why not just use the same portal we used to get here?”

  “Either they do not know about it, or it was destroyed. Knowing Darius, my guess would be the latter. He would have wanted to burn any bridges between our world and theirs.”

  “I’ve always wondered why he destroyed the Nebula, though. If we still had that ship, we wouldn’t have to worry about the Delegation. From what little information we have about it in the logs, it seems like the Nebula was what allowed us to defeat the Delegation the first time. To go to all that work to commandeer it and then just destroy it—it makes little sense.”

  Cyrith relaxed slightly. Perhaps Xander was waking up to the truth after all.

  “Which is why we need to take Hull as quickly as possible,” Cyrith remarked. “If the Delegation ever finds us, we need to be ready. Malthus and I were beginning to make preparations, but now that we’ve lost half our army, it looks like we’ll have to speed things up. Which brings me back to the point of this meeting. Are you certain you can keep the remaining assessors under your control?”

  Xander walked over to stand beside Cyrith, but instead of putting his back to the viewing window as Cyrith had done, he continued to gaze out into the dark gray waves of sand dashing themselves against the Persepolis.

  “The new Assessor Primary will be easy enough to control,” Xander assured him, “but I’m not Darius. If we had more time and a full-fledged esolace at our disposal I could do a much better job. The lack of memorants also makes things extremely difficult. I am only one man after all.”

  Cyrith turned to face the barrage of silt raging inside the viewing window. “Then I think it is time we recruit some new Developers.”

  Xander turned from the screen to regard his fellow scientist. “But that will take time and the Delegation could arrive any day.”

  “I realize that. But if we are going to win this fight, we have to remain unified, working together as one seamless unit. Darius at least knew how to accomplish that. We have little choice but to follow in his footsteps.”

  “We can begin by seeing what we have in the vault.”

  “Yes, that makes the most sense,” Cyrith answered. “But we may have to bring in some fresh bodies as well.”

  “Agreed,” Xander replied. “If only memorants were not so difficult to come by.�
�

  “I believe the battle at Hull may help us in more ways than one, then,” Cyrith concluded, pursing his lips into the barest representation of a smile that the human face was capable of.

  The two Developers remained standing there, staring out into the meteorological mayhem. So much sand, yet it looked more like an empty void than an actual mass. Somewhere out there was the Wayman city of Hull, a base cobbled together from scraps and protected by primitive andros, their pathetic brains riddled with superstition and ignorance.

  “We will prevail,” Cyrith declared. “We have to. We are all that humanity has left.”

  Six

  Counter Intuitive

  The light of the chronotrace faded and the Maven’s command center shimmered back into view. The men around the table kept staring at the device as if they needed the projection to start up again to answer all their questions.

  Adan was just as confused as everyone else. The Collective in general, and the Developers in particular, had always seemed invincible to him, their knowledge and power virtually limitless. They had banished disease, hunger, all negative emotions—even death. And yet, based on what he had just witnessed, they apparently had fears and weaknesses of their own. Malthus had told Gavin about a coming conflict, but until now, it hadn’t seemed real.

  “Are you sure your device was working properly?” Jax remarked after a long silence. “Those two didn’t sound like Admins to me.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Raif agreed, “definitely Beta version material there. Maybe even Alpha.”

  Adan understood what Raif was getting at, but he wasn’t ready to believe Cyrith and Xander were completely incompetent based on a single conversation. They still had the Collective fleet and that gave them the upper hand.